Lessons from my Mother

I always remember my Mother telling me this one night when I was 17, not long before I went to University. It was in response to my telling her ‘I don’t want to ever get married.’

“Somewhere in the world, someone is thinking of you right now. They just don’t know it’s you yet. They don’t know your name or where you come from. They don’t know what music you listen to or which football team you support. They don’t know what you look like. But they know you make them laugh and they know they’ll love you in a way nobody else ever will. They’ll know it’s you they’ve spent so many years thinking of within moments of meeting you. And you’ll know it too. And then we’ll see what you have to say about getting married, young man.”

Mothers are wise, indeed.

Many years later, not long after we had been told she wouldn’t defeat the cancer plaguing her body, she told me;

“You still haven’t met her.”

The comment came from nowhere and I was living with a woman at the time too. So it was a surprise.

“Met who?” I asked.

“The girl who’s spent her whole life thinking about you.”

I knew she was right and the woman I was living with at the time also knew she was right. She and I are friends these days and look back on our relationship as a time of lessons, but not lessons learned by two people who were ever meant to be.

Before my Mother died, she told me there were two things she needed to know before she could ‘leave in Peace.’

“First off, I need to know you and your sister will look after each other.”

“Of course we will,” I promised.

“Second, I need you to promise you will at least be open to love. I know you won’t go looking and I don’t expect you to. It’s not becoming of a man to look for it. But when it finds you – and believe me you will know it – don’t shut it out. Let it in and everything that comes with it, the good and the bad. Let yourself love.”

“I’ll try.”

It amazes me when I think back on those conversations in my Mother’s final days just how well she knew me, how she could practically read my mind and just how much wisdom she possessed.

The world is missing a wonderful woman. But I’m the lucky fellow with a mind full of memories of her.